THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN POLITICS: PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

One of the social events of the 21st century has been the growing number of women in political leadership and decision making, although there have been major challenges in ensuring that gender equity is met in political institutions. The paper presents a study on female participation in politics, detection of the trends of representation, participation, and influence in the political spheres of various countries and regions. The mixed-method design is used, which will include quantitative data based on the electoral data and legislative data with a qualitative aspect based on the structured interviews with the female politicians, policymakers and political analysts. These results demonstrate that there are still significant differences: those countries where legal processes, gender quotas, and high effectiveness of the civil society are conducive to female political participation demonstrate greater rates of female political participation, and countries with strong patriarchal traditions and where the institution functions slowly have slower gains. Nevertheless, the participation of women in politics has resulted in greater support of inclusive politics, social welfare, and gender responsive legislation, demonstrating the transformative power of equitable representation. In addition, the perception of effectiveness varies according to the context, in advanced democracies, female leadership is perceived to be good in policy innovation and collaborative rule making, but in emerging democracies it is about symbolic representation and incremental empowerment. The intervention policy and strategic frameworks that can improve the political participation of women are also discussed in the paper, and some of the strategies that can be employed to achieve this are intervention leadership courses, legislative quotas, awareness, and mentoring programs. The barriers and advancements in the political participation of women make this study relevant to a refined interpretation of gender relations in political representation and offers factual policies to the policymaking community, feminist organizations, and international bodies that aim at achieving fair political representation.